ART BASEL RECEPTION

OPEN HOURS

IN PARTNERSHIP

The exhibition ‘Unreal. The Algorithmic Present’ at HeK examines the complexity of our time when the separation between the digital and the real has become obsolete and presents works that illustrate the often hidden materiality of the bits and bytes.

Featuring 24 works by international artists, algorithmic processes of our digital presence are physically experienced in poetic installations and immersive projections.

By revealing the mechanisms and the means of digital processes that constitute our present experiences of reality, the works united in the exhibition show us a new logic of the real.

A series of time-based media artworks from artists testing new formats for artmaking, the TRANSFER Download presents custom three-channel solo presentations as part of ‘Unreal. The Algorithmic Present’ at the Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel.

A dozen artworks are installed in one hyperspace, creating a layered salon-style exhibition format which debuted last year at the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco and exhibited again as part of The Current Museum of Art in NYC. The immersive installation space rotates to feature a single work at a time – formats include algorithmic video, time-based narrative, generative 3D/VR, web-based work, GIFs, and other moving image.

The TRANSFER Download features a selection of new and existing works spanning themes of technology and the body, architectural space reimagined through moving images, and urban/glitch landscapes.

TRANSFER Director, Kelani Nichole

“The TRANSFER Download invites visitors to get intimate with new formats . Featuring transitory media, this selection of works represents artists pushing new formats for artmaking – a virtual salon that illuminates the bifurcation of scarcity and authenticity in contemporary art.”

FEATURED ARTISTS

AES+F – ‘Last Riot’
The heroes of the new epoch have only one identity, that of participants in the last riot. Each fights both self and the other, there’s no longer any difference between victim and aggressor, male and female. This world celebrates the end of ideology, history and ethics.
(2005-2007, HD Video, 3-Channel Trailer)

CLAUDIA HART – ‘Empire’
Hart surrounds the viewer with a continuous animation of a virtual monument that slowly decays, rotting as it transits from sunrise to sunset.
(2010, 4-Channel 3D Animation with Music by Ella Joyce Buckley)

SABRINA RATTE – ‘Plaza Concrète’
Mixing analog and digital technologies, ‘Plaza Concrète’ is a series of hallways generated by electronic signals. Unfolding inside melting architectures, the space depicted is reminiscent of the malleable nature of the video image and manifests the tension between matter and electricity through constant shifts of perspectives.
(2016, 3-Channel Video with Audio by Roger Tellier-Craig)

ROSA MENKMAN – ‘DCT: Syphoning’
Inspired by ‘Flatland’, Menkman tells the story of a father who introduces his son to different levels of compression; they move from dither, to lines, to macroblocks (the realm in which they normally resonate) to the ‘future’ realms of wavelets and vectors.
(2016, 3D Video teaser of her VR Installation at DiMoDA)

DANIEL TEMKIN – ‘Stripe Modulator’
Temkin’s open-source ‘Stripe Modulator’ is a tiny algorithm generating an immersive field of color bands. These stripes drift and bend collectively within each color channel according to simple rules, creating retinally-stunning perceptual effects as they interact with stripes of other hues across the visual space.
(2016, Video Composition from Algorithmic Website online at http://danieltemkin.com/StripeModulator)

RICK SILVA & NICOLAS SASSOON – ‘SIGNALS’
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Silva and Sassoon reflect upon their relationship to their natural surrounding by bringing to light a simulated ecological ruin as a gesture of contemplation towards an environment subject to perpetual human alteration.
(2016, Single-Channel HD Video with Audio)

ROLLIN LEONARD – ‘Spinning Pinwheel of Death’
Leonard’s looped self portrait emulates a digital distortion – without employing any post-production effects – by using water as optics. His photographs are taken through drops of water, each droplet acts as a flexible, temporary lens.
(2015-16, Vertical 2-Channel 4k Looped Moving Image)

LATURBO AVEDON – ‘ID’
A poetic visualization of the creation of personal metadata, for the identification of a digital self – born from code. In ‘ID’ LaTurbo addresses how social media platforms have continued to move toward the creation of authenticators adding real name policies and hungry terms of service to access to personal information.
(2015, Single Channel Video with Audio)

EVA PAPAMARGARITI – ‘Prosomiosis’
Papamargariti’s 3D rendered animated scenes create a fictitious digital environment inspired by geometries and patterns found in the natural world, re-constructed and re-presented as fragments of a virtual ecosystem manifesting itself through objects, shapes and motion.
(2015, Single Channel Video with Audio)

LORNA MILLS – ‘Wnrwnrchickndnr’
Mills takes us along on a romp of cross-species love that ends all too badly. With elements culled from a variety of online sources, her moving image collages are in a state of constant oscillation; the particular and peculiar rapidly expanding to universals and then, just a quickly, contracting right back again.
(2016, 3-Channel Video from Animated GIF Collages)